Work on my book is coming to a climax and I am also taking a little family break to enjoy Columbus Day -- so I don't have time to do a full posting. But the latest issue of Biolinguistics is available online and has several papers that normally would inspire a post of its own. Check out:

Fist to fist, this picture shows how things emerge from the body rather than by being stored in the body.

Elliott D. Ross’s paper on the brain (abstract here) discussed in my last post has plenty more food for thought. In particular, Ross discusses the subject of brain efficiency which, I confess, was a new idea for me but one that immediately shows its utility in suggesting topics for human and speech evolution.

Homo ergaster two million years ago was at the back end of the brain's growth period. What was that brain growth all about and how did it influence speech?

Perhaps the best known fact about human evolution is that recently our brain has gotten much bigger. Starting about 2.5 million years ago, and following a reasonably straight slope, it continued growing until about 200,000 years ago. Australopithecus brains were about the size of modern chimpanzee brains. With the appearance of the Homo lineage the brain started growing and kept it up until the arrival of ours truly, Homo sapiens. Surely this development must have included something about language, but what?

The June 1 issue of The Neuroscientist gives much food for thought in a paper by Elliot D. Ross titled, “Cerebral Localization of Functions and the Neurology of Language” (abstract here). The paper reviews how the brain works and examines the production of language in detail as an extended example. Most importantly, it shows how fully integrated language production is in the brain. It makes the idea that language might be some sort of big-bang hopeful monster as almost childishly naïve, and it also supports the argument that this level of integration puts an older date to the origins of speech.